There it was scattered on the ground. The double headed birthday prayer beads, I had just started making my way to heaven on, were strewn across the floor.
“It’s my fault, really.”
I thought. I HAD left the gods, I mean dogs, at home alone all day. It is their JOB to ruin things, right?
I picked up the beads in my hands, one at a time and thought superstitiously, as I listened to them clink in the bottom of the glass jar.
“Now it’s really over.”
It was as if those beads were the only, the last, thing holding love together.
It was February, and I had given my Valentine a card with an image of a chained Buddha. The chain around the Buddha’s waist reminded me of those beads he had strung so carefully for my birthday.
On Valentine’s Day I did some research and found that there are three competing St. Valentines, each with his own vague but romantic story, and the actual roots of St. Valentine’s Day likely lie in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia in which young men would draw the name of a maiden in a lottery and would then keep her as a sexual companion for the year.
Pope Gelasius I, who was less than thrilled with this custom, changed the lottery to have both young men and women draw the names of saints whom they would then emulate for the year.
So, February has had to do with love, erotic and spiritual, at least since the Romans.
February is also the time of year that birds mate and humans lift their heads and anticipate the coming of spring. It was only in the 17th century that anonymous cards of admiration were exchanged and even more recently that roses and jewelry and chocolates and EXPECTATIONS were added to the occasion.
As I sit here with my handful of broken prayers, it seems to me almost as if the chains that bind us, if we could only meditate on their links like this strand of beads, might actually be the things that release us from bondage.
It is our limits we must come to understand, the limits of Eros and of spirit. And in my case, the beads have broken. The chain has unraveled and the dogs (gods?) have spoken,
“It’s spring: Leave the bedroom, enter the garden and digest the life of a saint instead of a box of chocolates.”
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